Indian poor paid a penny to spend a penny

Residents in southern India are earning a penny every time they spend one at
public lavatories in an effort to clean up the streets.

By Rahul Bedi in New Delhi

1:13AM BST 07 Jul 2008

Scores of people queue every day in Musiri, a town in Tamil Nadu, to be paid 10 paise (around 0.8 pence) for each visit. The trips are entered on a “user card” and totalled up once a month, usually earning about 50p.

The government backed scheme – organised by the Society for Community Organisation and People’s Education – is a response to the common practice of Indians relieving themselves in the open, as sanitation still eludes millions.

“Many of us began using toilets for urination only after these ecologically friendly toilets were constructed in the area” said S Rajasekaran, a local resident.

And the waste does not go to waste – local authorities are also collecting 250 litres of urine every day to be used as a crop fertiliser, an official from the state’s agricultural university said.

According to experts at the World Toilet Summit in Delhi earlier this year around 2.6 billion people – over 40 percent of the world’s population – do not have access to proper toilets; half of them live in India and China.